Flight Test Engineers' Use of MATLAB

Thomas Lampe, Saab

Though the ability to predict the behavior of an aircraft has improved in the last decade, the requirements for observations and data from flight tests have not diminished but, rather, have increased. For almost every flight in a modern test aircraft, gigabytes of tightly packed time-stamped information is collected from test equipment onboard and from data buses in the aircraft. For more than a decade, engineers have used MATLAB® with their systems to extract and further refine this data. The demand for lower development cost is met by cutting the time and effort needed to provide results from tests and also by improving the ability to identify significant events during ongoing tests. Therefore, the trend is to analyze on-line compared to post-flight analysis. This presentation discusses the steps taken to use MATLAB for that purpose. The presentation also covers some of the challenges with providing an in-house developed toolbox in an industrial environment.